Coiled like a furious spring, Wyatt pushed away from the wall and stalked to the other side of the room, near the door. He reached his farthest point, pivoted, and walked halfway back to me, blazing. “He works in the city, Evy, and he can’t possibly be Call or be working with him. I
“But I don’t.” I stood up, planted my hands firmly on my hips, and returned his scowl tenfold. “Come on, Truman. I just bared my soul for you to see, touch, and possibly sneer at. Toss me a fucking bone here. Who did the kid grow up to be?”
He continued to glare, but his resolve was crumbling. He raked a hand through his short hair, around his neck, and back up to pinch the bridge of his nose. I hadn’t moved; he had to know I wouldn’t, now bound and determined to get this information from him. I wanted to know who he was protecting.
“Fine,” he snapped. “You want to know whose father was killed by a Halfie and his mother and sister by rogue bounty hunters? He’s the Clan Assembly’s killer, Evy, the one they keep accusing you of protecting.”
My face went slack as confusion settled in. “Rufus?”
“No, not Rufus.” Something sinister flashed in his onyx eyes. “Me.”
Chapter Twenty
5:24 P.M.
The phrase “You could cut the tension with a knife” flashed through my mind, because his final statement shut down all activity in the room. He didn’t move. I didn’t move. Even the distant hums of electricity and running water faded out, replaced by numb silence. My brain refused to understand what he’d just admitted. I felt queasy, unbalanced. Seriously confused.
He blinked and broke the spell.
“You …” I swallowed hard against a lump in my throat, mouth dry. “You didn’t lead the attack on Sunset Terrace. How—?”
“That’s not why the Kitsune … It’s not that.”
I closed my eyes and exhaled hard. The queasiness increased as I prepared to learn the real reason the Kitsune Elder had accused me of protecting a killer. It wasn’t for the Coni and Stri; it was something else entirely. When I looked up, Wyatt had slumped into one of the room’s two upholstered chairs. He gazed at the floor, hands folded in his lap. Miserable.
I’d cut into a festering wound because I couldn’t stop needing to control my environment and everything in it. I couldn’t just accept his word; I had to know the facts for myself. And it had opened up a side of Wyatt I’d never seen or asked about before—his past. He hadn’t sprung, fully formed, out of a hole in the ground. I just hadn’t questioned his life before the Triads; he never talked about it.
It was lame, but all I could come up with was, “I’m sorry.”
“You know better than that. You hate pity as much as I do. Don’t do that.” He leaned forward, resting both elbows on his knees. Still giving the floor his full attention. “I don’t deserve it.”
“You were seventeen, Wyatt.”
“I wasn’t there. I couldn’t try to stop it or save them, because I wasn’t even there that night. I should have been. We promised we’d be there by eight to help inventory the food, but we went to a friend’s house instead.”
“We?” I tried to recall what he’d told me about that story—what I’d thought was simply a brief history of the Triads’ birth. What had, in fact, been a snapshot of his own life. “You and your brother?” It felt so odd to say those words.
Even odder to see him nod. “Nicky … Nicandro hated that restaurant. Hated working there after school. His revulsion made sense afterward.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he was Gifted, too, Evy. He had precognitive abilities, but he had no control over them. Usually he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was seeing or why. He told me he thought his visions about the restaurant involved us, that he was saving our lives by keeping me away that night.”
Being born Gifted is extremely rare. It requires that the birth take place over a Break—a magical hot spot. They exist all over the city, but none of them in hospital delivery rooms. The odds of two people in the same family being born … Wait. “Wyatt, were you and Nicky twins?” I asked.
He scrubbed both hands across his face, then looked at me with red eyes. “I was six minutes older, but he was always trying to protect me. I guess he did, since we lived and our family died.”
A hundred questions whirled through my mind, all eager for answers. But Wyatt seemed willing to tell the story at his own pace. I turned to face him more directly and just listened.
“I know the Fey came to us because they sensed our Gifts,” he said, speaking as much to me as to himself. “Nicky and I were three months from eighteen, so no one objected when our supposed aunt showed up to take temporary custody. She offered us help with our Gifts and opened up the entire Dreg world to us.”
“Amalie?”
“In her avatar form, yes. She and her sprites were a driving force from the start. I fell headfirst into training and never looked back. There were seven of us those first couple of months, learning to track and to fight—how to turn a specific Dreg’s strength into their weakness. All of the things we teach. Then we started hunting.”
“Rufus?”
“He was there—the last of the first seven to be recruited. We couldn’t stand each other, actually, not for a long time.”
My mouth twitched. Rufus had admitted the same thing two days ago. Funny how that hatred had grown into a solid friendship over the course of a decade.
Wyatt inhaled deeply, held it, then exhaled hard. “Nicky hated it, every minute, and for a while I hated him. I thought he was weak. I was so angry at everything we’d lost and at the people who’d done it, I couldn’t see straight. Killing goblins and Halfies and anything else we were sent after … it let me feel something, when the rest of the time all I felt was numb.”
Boy, could I commiserate with that state of mind. “What happened to the bounty hunters who killed your family?”
His expression became thunderous. Deadly. “Eight months after the fire, we were really no better than those bounty hunters. Amalie fed us information through her sprite aides, and some of her other Fey contacts tried to guide us in the field, but we had no chain of command. Nothing that really worked, so we did what we wanted.”
Hearing the tumultuous beginnings of an organization I’d always seen as rigid and uncompromising was as disturbing to me as it was a relief. It was difficult to imagine Wyatt ten years ago, his fury at life driving him away from his own brother, blinded by vengeance for the dead. So unlike the man I knew—and yet, still so much the same.
“It was ten years ago last month. By sheer luck, I found out who one of the bounty hunters was. I wanted to rip his lungs out through his throat and wear them like wings. Nicky tried to stop me, wouldn’t let me leave our apartment. He said if I went after this guy, I’d be killed, too. I was so angry, I didn’t care, and I told him so. We fought, and I pushed him.”
Although Wyatt’s voice remained calm, he looked lost, caught up in the memory of such awful pain. I could guess how his story ended, and I wanted to stop him from saying anything else. Wanted to save him the emotional agony. But something thick and heavy clogged my throat and stole my voice.
After a deep exhalation, Wyatt said it: “Nicky tripped and hit his head on the corner of the dining table. It fractured his skull and killed him instantly.”
I don’t know when I’d started to cry—tears skimmed my cheeks. His story broke my heart—his tone of voice as much as the content. He’d spoken with a matter-of-fact clarity usually reserved for unemotional topics while still loading each word with fury and humiliation. Admitting to the tragic consequences of his temper had to have been as hard to verbalize as my own earlier monologue had been for me.
“I think he knew it was him or me,” Wyatt said, his voice almost a whisper. “He knew one of us was going to
